🔅 Wimbledon and an Anti-Apartheid Legacy
Plus, An AI Co-Pilot for Reporting on Africa
Good morning from… can you guess where? (Answer at the bottom!)
Wimbledon Champion’s Arthur Ashe's South African Legacy
It’s Wimbledon season again, and Centre Court nostalgia inevitably drifts back to 5 July 1975, when Arthur Ashe – calm, bespectacled, already in his thirties – dismantled the brash, 22-year-old defending champion Jimmy Connors to become the tournament’s first Black men’s champion. Ashe treasured the victory, yet insisted it was not the most important entry on his résumé. What he hoped would outlive him was his campaign against South Africa’s apartheid system.
After being denied visas for years, Ashe finally set foot in South Africa for the 1973 South African Open, on the condition that Black spectators be admitted. Anti-apartheid activists worried he was legitimising the regime; Ashe felt he needed to see conditions himself. In Soweto he ran a packed tennis clinic, and one of the spectators, future author Mark Mathabane who was only then a child, later called Ashe “the first free Black man I had ever seen.”
The visit convinced Ashe that sporting isolation, not polite engagement, would hit the apartheid state hardest. He co-founded Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid with singer Harry Belafonte, lobbied the United Nations for sanctions and was arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington in 1985, an act he believed cost him the U.S. Davis Cup captaincy but amplified the cause worldwide.
Ashe returned periodically to South Africa, helping launch the Arthur Ashe Soweto Tennis Centre in 1976. Though vandalised during that year’s student uprisings, the facility was rebuilt in 2007; it now boasts 16 courts, a library and skills programmes where Serena and Venus Williams have given clinics. Board members say its mission mirrors Ashe’s: nurturing “young leaders,” not merely ace servers.
Nelson Mandela, freshly released from prison in 1990, requested a meeting with Ashe, recognising a fellow strategist who wielded sport as political leverage. Ashe died of AIDS-related complications in 1993, a year before Mandela’s election ended apartheid.
Yet every July when the strawberries are served and champions are crowned, Ashe’s deeper triumph resurfaces: a racket in one hand, a cause in the other, proving that a match point can also be a turning point.
An AI Co-Pilot for Reporting on Africa
Why the concept is useful
Stereotypes are statistical shortcuts. Many LLMs scrape legacy news archives that over-index on conflict, corruption and safari imagery. Prompting the model to foreground local actors, solutions and historical context is a low-friction way to counter that baked-in bias.
Time-pressed newsrooms need guard-rails, not lectures. A co-pilot that flags missing context (“Have you included the local research institute that pioneered this tech?”) or tone (“Is the subject framed as passive recipient rather than protagonist?”) is more actionable than another style-guide memo.
It scales beyond journalism. NGOs, corporate comms teams and even travel marketers often recycle the same tropes. A bias-aware prompt library could nudge them toward richer storytelling too.
What an effective co-pilot might look like
Agency lens: “List three local individuals or institutions driving change in this story. Have you quoted at least one?”
Context card: “You’re writing about cocoa prices… do you want a 90-word explainer on the 1960s marketing boards and current ECOWAS policy to give readers economic context?”
Ethics flag: “You’re describing children in conflict. Confirm you’ve followed consent guidelines and avoided pity-centric framing.”
Bottom line: An Africa-savvy co-pilot is less about policing language and more about expanding the creative aperture through which journalists (and their audiences) view the continent. And you can check out the tool right here.
Remittances on the Chopping Block: Trump’s “Beautiful” Tax Targets Africa’s Lifeline
After gutting aid and hiking tariffs, the Trump administration now wants a 3.5% federal surcharge on every dollar wired back home. Add the usual 6% in bank fees and voilà, America becomes the priciest G7 launchpad for care-packages-in-cash.
Who gets bruised?
Nigeria will lose roughly $215 million a year.
Gambia & Liberia remittances make up a quarter of national income, so the hit lands straight in the family pantry.
Senegal, already crowned the World Bank’s most remittance-reliant nation, is now bracing for another gut punch.
The UN wants remittance costs below 3% by 2030; Team Trump is driving them north of 9%.
Analysts see a recipe for deeper poverty, hungrier households, and – irony alert – more migration.
Food for Thought
“Think first before you speak.”
— Mozambique Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is from Asmara, Eritrea. You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.
This is the first thing I've read that gives me cause for optimism about AI. Thank you. And an interesting Ashe report.